In February 2022, not many people would have predicted that in May 2026 Zelensky would be waiting to meet his sixth UK Prime Minister.

Govts employ hundreds of media advisers and spend $10s of millions, only to communicate with Australians when they’re most distracted. It's called "taking out the trash", and it's one way governments try to bury embarrassing and unwelcome info. live.thepoint.com.au/2026/05/the-...

read that last sentence 5 times.

Really enjoyed this conversation. If you want to see what a bunch of super smart people think about our book, check it out.

This, exactly.

When the leading fraction of capital was Wall Street, they were enemies of humanity in all sorts of ways. But they didn’t have the same direct organic affinity for a politics where all value and authority radiates from one individual, and rules-based administration is an obstacle to be swept away.

Justice instead of punishment. Gift link.

I've wondered why "true crime" hogs so much TV time. This thread has an explanation.

The reason crime stories perform well is weirdly, because they make people feel powerful. For right-wingers, a lot of the allure of crime stories is that it reinforces their self-serving myths. They like it when criminals are not white, so they can feel superior, for instance.

In fact, yes, I do think it’s a widespread social crisis that students are going to be graduating without the capacity to think critically and without subject matter knowledge. At a time when technofascism prevails, more of us should be terrified about the consequences of universalizing gAI use.

And racism.

Ill be very clear: the National Archives of India used AI to digitize their materials, and the transcriptions are a nightmare. And because the index is based off the AI transcriptions, so much of it is just...unusable. But sure, I guess, carefully managed AI tools, etc etc.

If computer/tech people insist on making claims about how AI will transform fields they neither know or understand nor are trained in, and do the same thing repeatedly, for years, then you’re going to be dealing with some irritated actual trained professionals in those fields

My favorite role is Mother. And it’s strengthened my resolve to fight. The children are ours. All of them. From Harlem to Palestine. inthesetimes.com/article/gaza...

There was a quote that said something like Black people worship a Jesus who knows what it's like to be lynched, while white people worship a Jesus who will forgive them for being part of a lynch mob.

daaaaang

My book is very very quickly turning into a treatise on how the targeting of immigrants is a vehicle for fascism. It’s happening before our eyes and every day it’s getting worse.

A good cautionary tale for when someone claims that trusting data analysis done with an LLM is good because it’s “objective.” In this example, Copilot apparently decided to ignore the data it was given and just run with all the subconscious biases its (human-made) training data inevitably gave it.

Wrote this in a Aug 2023, two months before Oct 7, on Arab Israeli peace deals being nothing more than authoritarian conflict management. I said they do nothing more than exacerbate the underlying sources of conflict and repression, and would cause more violence. arabcenterdc.org/resource/ass...

this type of effort will also likely reinforce growing perceptions in the Arab world of Israeli overreach (even as concerns about Iran grow)

No mandatory quarantine and no testing: abcnews.com/Internationa...

It's always a trip to write for academic journals . Here, I wrote about the vampire slop machine known as generative AI and how its ruining everything. read.dukeupress.edu/critical-ai/...

Gave a talk on Hindutva history, Sanskrit and AI and I think the piece is cooked enough. Historians of science and technology, ideas for which journal to submit a piece on this? 🗃️

This was quite public before the war. I'm lazy, so I won't dig up a post where I repeated this.

private details of health and social vulnerabilities students disclose in comms to their faculty are precisely what makes data of young people - soon to make the largest spending decisions of their life like more education debt, car ownership, home ownership - valuable enough to force platform use

"Trump's ceasefire" looks as likely to have originated in Washington as last winter's 28-point "US peace plan". Extraordinary to see the president of the United States acting as the face-saving front for Putin - not that Zelensky's response gives Putin any scope for face-saving.

So am I. The shift in attitude from the very top downwards was so striking.

get caught up on the backstory while you can't get caught up on grading theamericanvandal.substack.com/p/historyofc...

if you're wondering how the AI bubble is doing, OpenAI is borrowing USD 4bn from private equity TPG/Bain Capital/ Brookfield Asset ​Management, at 17.5% interest, to embed OpenAI products in their 2,000+ portfolio companies. literally paying Wall Street to force its products on their firms

“We’re not simply part of the political process" * When we take away your right to bodily autonomy * When we take away your right to vote and be represented in government. [THIS IS A RHETORICAL QUESTION, NO ANSWERS NECESSARY] Does he believe this or is he trying to gaslight us?

We’re not angry enough. www.thenewdaily.com.au/news/politic...

This is only a big deal if you’re into food.

OTOH,

Kids who watch a ton of Bluey will probably become middle schoolers with Australian characteristics and our society will have to adjust to that

No ballroom costs a billion dollars That money is for the Trump family

And 30 members of Congress would like to know about them.

I never want to see Katy Perry either, so I get it

I spend a lot of my time talking about how we are in a transition to distributed, sustainable, and abundant energy, one that is unprecedented in our existence as a species, and what the implications are for, well, everything. A different, better world is now possible, and we want to live there.

I’m increasingly convinced that support for the crypto industry is the only litmus test we need for politics. Does a rep strongly support the crypto industry, like Schiff does? Then expect him to debase himself to the AI industry too. www.standwithcrypto.org/politicians/...

"He spoke about the killing of Palestinians and said: “We are killing like we haven’t killed since 1967."

Easier to read, but impossible to understand. Small thing: presidents don't send "my representatives," they send official representatives of the United States, usually from the State Department, but definitely vetted, cleared, and employed by the U.S. government. Ok, that's a big thing.

Giuliani is on his way to his hell, which is full of seasoned food and Black people who are being neither stopped nor frisked

this is how I found out

Don’t send Will to voicemail… answer the call (to join his team!) www.climate200.com.au/jobs

historically, financial repression of pension/insurance savings via credit policy was the norm in developmental states. and it will become again, as countries have to accelerate projects of economic sovereignty.

I read the Dawkins piece three times. He is definitely ascribing intelligence to his Claudia, as he talks about it ‘writing’ poetry. It cannot write poetry. He’s not making some complicated point about neurodivergence, we shouldn’t be reading ourselves into what he is writing.

It’s astonishing just how utterly incompetent university administration across the Anglosphere is in upholding basic tenets of editorial and academic freedom. www.theguardian.com/books/2026/m...

I really wish we’d at least get the language right. It’s no an evacuation. It’s expulsion.

Environmentalism without class politics is gardening.